North America LEGO® Conventions & Events

Here is a list of the LEGO® Conventions in North America. This is a place where some of the best adult and kid LEGO® builders in the country gather to display their work, exchange ideas, and share their passion for LEGO®.

In the list below, we have bolded the LEGO conventions & events in blue that we are currently attending in 2014. More locations may be added in the future.

Did you wait till the last minute to come up with Halloween costume for yourself or your child? No need to despair as we have been there and have had to come up with costumes on the fly ourselves. Here is one LEGO costume that you can build in less than 30 minutes.

Build A LEGO Minifigure Head in 30 minutes

MATERIALS

Lego Sort & Store (Cost $39.99. Best part of buying it is that you can reuse the LEGO sorter after Halloween is over.)

Duct Tape

Bike Helmet (the size of the person wearing the costume)

Small screwdriver

STEPS

Open LEGO Sort & Store Package

Unscrew the bottom half of the LEGO Sort & Store head

Place the bike helmet in the LEGO Sort & Store head

Using the duct tape, tape the bike helmet to the LEGO Sort & Store Head. Make sure the bike helmet is flush next to the LEGO Sort & Store Head. See photos below to see how it can be applied.

If the bike helmet is too loose inside of the LEGO Sort & Store Head, use newspaper/paper towels to fill in the air pockets, so the bike helmet moves less. IMPORTANT: The bike helmet combined with the LEGO Sort & Store Head can be quite heavy on a person’s neck, so make sure they are comfortable wearing it before heading out to trick or treat.

Grab an old costume for the shirt and pants and you can make a variety of new LEGO Mini figure for each year (LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Construction Man, Minecraft LEGO Guy, etc.).

It takes a full team of our young architects and engineers to create a Sumerian Ziggurat of this size out of LEGO. The Ziggurat our students studied for this model was built in Mesopotamia over 4000 years ago! This model was built at our Play-Well Ventura Center.

Our Play-Well Summer Photo Contest has finally come to an end. We had so much fun seeing all the creative entries submitted this summer. All of the entries were great in their own right. We asked you to vote for your favorites and here are the results.

Because our teaching kits have over 20,000 pieces of LEGO, we are constantly in need of additional LEGO pieces. So, we created a Play-Well Parts Shop to supply our teaching kits located across the country with LEGO pieces. A few years ago, we decided that if we were already supplying LEGO to our kits, why not create a public Play-Well Parts Shop so LEGO builders of all ages in the area could do the same.

In our Play-Well Parts Shop, kids and adults have access to over 100,000 pieces of LEGO to purchase. There are at least 150 variations of LEGO pieces to choose from. LEGO Mini-figures, LEGO bulbs, LEGO Bow Tie pieces, and fluorescent LEGO jewel pieces to name a few.

This is a sample of the type of LEGO pieces we have available at our parts shop.

All parts are individually priced out.

We have had many LEGO builders find pieces that they needed for a particular project here.

After our successful photo contest last summer, The Brick Stanley Project, we have decided to do a new summer photo contest this year. For this contest, we are asking our families to take a picture of the words PLAY WELL, spelled out in a creative, unique, slightly ridiculous way. We see “Play Well” as not only our name, but also our philosophy on how our organization works. When our engineering students are playing well in class, they are solving problems, exploring the world, and learning about themselves through play. When our staff is playing well, they are having more fun than they have had at any other job. So, we wanted to spread the message of playing well and here is how we are going to do it:

Here are some examples of photos already submitted:

Carter & Rogan Schmidbauer, Phoenix, AZ

Brandon Jones, Kirkland, WA

Santa Barbara, CA

Lester Mendaros, Pleasanton, CA

Ben Pfister, Ventura, CA

When you have taken your photo, you can submit it in the following ways:

You can even submit more than one photo if you’d like. We will gather all the photos from the contest and in August, we will have our Play-Well Families vote for their favorite photo. The top three winners could win a Engineering with LEGO® Birthday Party, a LEGO® Technic Set, or LEGO® Bow Tie. All photos will be included in our upcoming video, so everyone wins. Voting ends at 11:59 PM on Labor Day, September 2nd. We hope you enter the contest. If you have any questions, email Jeff at jeff@play-well.org.